


capable of believing

by maraudersourwolf



Series: yellow post-it notes [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Feelings Realization, Happy Ending, M/M, POV Theo Raeken, Post-it Notes, Self-Acceptance, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 19:37:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13981905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maraudersourwolf/pseuds/maraudersourwolf
Summary: Theo finds the first one while he’s pushing back the driver seat to take a well deserved nap near the preserve, after driving around aimlessly to find a safe place to park, and the sound of paper crumpling at the abrupt weight thrown at it takes his attention.The too big, smudged by not letting the ink dry properly, handwriting reads“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes”





	capable of believing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snaeken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snaeken/gifts).



> The story wasn't supposed to have a sequel, because I don't work well with chaptered things.  
> But comment happened and ideas flooded. And then Cal sent me that picture.  
> So now there's a sequel.  
> I'm still not sure how I feel about it, I've been framed.
> 
>  
> 
> I'm well aware that this might be an emotional ride.  
> But I've written enough fluff the last time to earn me some angst coins to spend.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Songs I listened while writing this, because I like to rip my own heart out**  
>  I Run To You by MISSIO  
> Ribcage by Crywolf  
> Origami by GANGES
> 
>  
> 
>  **Brett,** thanks a lot for the extra boost of confidence.  
>  Otherwise, this would have been deleted completely from existance.  
>  
> 
> It's messy, like always.  
> Probably has no sense at all.  
> Sort of beta'd.
> 
> Enjoy!

 

 

Theo finds the first one while he’s pushing back the driver seat to take a well deserved nap near the preserve, after driving around aimlessly to find a safe place to park, and the sound of paper crumpling at the abrupt weight thrown at it takes his attention.

He thinks it is perhaps an old ticket from one of his late night shopping, when his mind can’t bare to take another nightmare and the world weighs a little bit more on his shoulders than it should. Maybe one of his lists, the ones that he never really takes with him and just writes for the sake of doing _something_ with his life, shoved into the space between the seats that everyone knows just lead into a nick of space and time that relates painfully to oblivion. He doesn’t know why he takes it out, either.

The too big, smudged by not letting the ink dry properly, handwriting reads _“I wish you could see yourself through my eyes”_ and his stomach churns in all the wrong ways, forcing into him the need to throw up the food he didn’t eat and taste the bile on his mouth like a mockery. The sleep seeps out of his body and suddenly reality is like a punch aimed right at the middle of his solar plexus. Painful, too real and leaving his mind flaring alert signs all around.

He hastily gets out of the truck, trying to break away from the only place that feels like home and now has been corrupted. A cage for a beast, that’s supposed to take his willowing self and protect him from the outside - big and scary and living; everything he wants to avoid.

He wonders who would be as stupid to pull something like this, who would be as cruel as to torture him this way. The answer is at the tip of his tongue and he bites it down until it bleeds, because he prefers bleeding and scabbing and painfully healing than deal with this, gutting him open, leaving him raw, like an experiment ready to be dissected. He has done his fare share of that, needles and tubes probing at the tender parts that are beyond physical and pieces of himself scattered around that he’s not sure he will ever mend. He doesn’t need that now. He doesn’t need that from him. He doesn’t need that from anyone.

The sudden realization that there are most likely more of those notes inside his truck, tucked in between small spaces where only secrets and things to be forgotten should be, has him climbing back into the truck and desperately surveying every corner of what should be only be his and now it’s not.

The second one is neatly folded in half and stored on the driver’s visor, the distinctive yellow of a post-it note jumping at plain sight between the many random papers that he’s not sure have any other purpose to be there besides the lack of incentive to clean and the never ending need to have something, _anything_ that reminds him of being there, _alive_.

The too big handwriting getting smaller as it comes closer to the edge and threatens to fall out, the ink pressed so tightly against the paper that it starts to get patchy. As if knowing the why of the mess it’s hiding in, it reads _“You’re still alive”_.

Theo’s throat closes and the air suddenly feels too thick to get inside his lungs as it should be. The need to throw up is there again but this time it makes the side of his eyes sting and he has to blink quickly to avoid shattering right there and then.

He balls it into his hand and throws it at the passenger seat, mind settled into taking away every trace of this bullshit from inside his truck. He doesn’t remember a moment where he felt so desperate, not even when he wakes up and he can still see Tara’s face smiling darkly down at him.

The next one is stuck on the rear mirror, the third he finds, and has a smiley face badly drawn over yellow paper. Still yellow, like the ones before, bright and shiny and full of something that he guesses it’s supposed to be delightful. He doesn’t understand why that color just stirs everything inside of him, like static drowning every sound and every rational thought and making his skin itch in the most odd way possible while memories swim back up to the middle of his head. There was a time when he was little and Stiles’ dad went to class and teached them all about safety on the street; yellow means precaution, the car stops and the passersby look at each side twice. Yellow warning signs that decorated the many dark and abandoned holes that served him as refuge, because experiments doesn’t need a roof over their heads, because a killer doesn’t deserve a place to call home. Yellow wolfsbane, the most effective poison besides your own mind. Yellow eyes that get you hunted down, almost killed, barely living.

He hates the color.

He hates this whole stupid game being played on him.

Balling this one too, he starts once again the chase of the obnoxious pieces of paper that slice and carve right through his skin, black ink smudging in such a way that reminds him of poisoning and dying. And maybe he can see himself bleeding from each word.

_“Wait for what you deserve”_

_“You have forever to be dead”_

_“Accept what you are.”_

_“Pain isn’t always only temporary and that’s okay”_

_“Just breathing is enough”_

_“You need to be a better you”_

_“You are under construction, right?”_

There’s ten notes in total.

Ten.

When he’s sure there’s no more of those hideous pieces of thought he didn’t ask for, he gets back into the front of the truck spitting swears under his breath through clenched teeth. He’s hastily taking them all, ready to throw them or burn them or shove them down the throat of his offender, when something bulging at the passenger seat feet takes his attention.

His journal, out in the open.

There’s something barely sticking out of it and Theo can feel as if his soul was left there, ready to be hurt and tarnished and torn into pieces. The air is sucked out of the truck’s cab and he’s just watching at the only thing that served to keep him from losing his mind, from consuming himself from inside out like a black hole, now being used for his destruction.

He takes it gingerly, clutching it between his hands as if it holds the weight of the universe in the discolored and dirty pages inside with his own scrawly handwriting filling the empty spaces. Opening it feels like more than he could bear, more than he could deal with right now. Theo doesn’t want to find a foreign handwriting as intrusive thoughts inside that little piece of purgatory he made out of paper and ink.

Pulling out the alien piece of paper, the first thing he notices is the lack of yellow. The lack of grainy, rough paper. Instead, smooth under the pad of his calloused fingers. The second thing Theo notices is that it’s a picture of him, taken from a safe distance, and printed in black and white. In it, he’s sitting in the floor, looking far away, and there’s nothing that would betray where or when it was taken, besides the look of loneliness tainting his own features. Theo wonders for a moment how is it possible that he didn’t even noticed someone taking a picture of him. The light plays over his profile in a way makes him look almost ethereal, almost too pure for the world he lives in. He knows it’s quite the opposite, there’s nothing divine out of him being corrupted to his very core, but even so he finds himself enraptured by it.

The ink, this time neatly spread on each letter. All of them rearranged on the blank space where his figure isn’t, as if instead of nothingless Theo was actually watching the words and facing his destiny.

Each of them feeling like a stab on the back with a poison that doesn’t roots under his skin and oozes black, but roots inside of what’s left of his soul and blooms in a way that makes Theo believe his heart will explode out of his chest by its own volition. It’s not poison, not at all, but his mind still takes it as an attack to the cold wall that he gathered through years to keep himself on his feet. He swallows thickly and it doesn’t taste like bile and nightmares, instead tastes like opportunities and emotions. New ones. Ones he can’t quite understand but want there, in the middle of his chest, burning down the ugly feelings he’s so used to harbor.

What he thought was a punishment for breathing, a bad joke played on him, are actually encouraging words to keep on going, to keep using as much space in the world as he needs to, as he wants to, as he craves to.

One by one, he takes every crumpled note from the passenger seat and flatten them with the heel of his shaky hand against the steering wheel. The need to burn them down, to shove them into the darkest corners of his mind and use them as fuel to keep the destructive fire, his spiteful existence going is now long forgotten and the need to cherish them, to keep them close and safe is making the tip of his fingers itch and the lump on his throat harden at the warmth spreading from the middle of his ribcage to every nerve end in his body.

This time tears fall, fat and heavy, down his face from the side of his nose to the tip of the bow arch of his lips and then further, down to his chin. He swats then away with the back of his hand once, twice, before giving up and just sob. A wrecked sound that breaks every rib, one by one, and mend them back together as it melts into a watery chuckle that can only be described as happiness blooming in his soul.

He doesn’t remember happiness.

He doesn’t remember the taste of tears that are not seasoned with guilt and regret or the way something can bloom inside of him without it being ugly and twisted and wrong, so wrong.

He doesn’t remember, but wants to.

The notes now once again crumpled but this time against his chest, his hands pressing roughly, as if he’s determined to push them past the flesh, the muscle, bones and every ugly thing inside of him, that doesn’t belong and he wants to erase, to light up that fire now flickering in his soul. A new beginning.

He wants to live and share that.

Like hands lacing over each other on a steering wheel. Warm calloused fingers tethering him back to reality, easing the tension out of his muscles and the fear out of his hackles with just a faint touch of a fingertip over his long since bruised and never healed knuckles.

Like tentative smiles with lips stretched until they create wrinkles at the side of eyes and a dimple in one cheek. Baby blue eyes that are supposed to be a cold color that instead lits him up, giving him a place to belong and reassuring that he has a spot in this bid and scary world that it’s just his to fill and no one else’s.

Like yellow post it notes with smudged ink that are hidden because he wasn’t really meant to find them unless he searched and a big handwriting that screams because it wants to be heard and bringing emotions he doesn’t know how to control because this heart isn’t his and it came without instructions.

There’s someone out there now.

Who believes.

Who waits.

_Who cares._

Theo lets the paper notes fall all around him, the photo laying neatly over one of his thighs, and pulls his hands towards his face to rub the tears away. Hiding his eyes behind the heel of his palms briefly, pressing tightly until a universe of stars and colors reveal under his eyelids. He tries to collect himself like he usually would, but this time he lets the calculated mask slip out completely and crash down at his feet. He doesn’t want it anymore, doesn’t need it for what he’s about to do.

Key jinggling is the only sound inside the truck’s cab, besides his heavy breathing. Fear is freezing his insides and before he can twist his wrist and turn off the ignition, he remembers himself that that’s the way things usually are when Liam is involved. You jump blindly into it, shoving the nagging uneasiness at the back of your head, put your all and hope for the best.

And that’s what he’s doing now.

 _Hoping_ for the best.

He doesn’t know when his hands stop covering his eyes or when his breathing stops being shallow and turns into soft puffs of air.

This time, when he pulls the truck out back on the street, there’s one destination settled in his mind.

Liam’s house.

The drive is short or too long, he doesn’t know. His mind is playing tricks on him, the never ending loop of thoughts that made him step out from reality and transformed the truck’s cab into a timeless prison where he’s driving towards the house of the only person he dares to care about. Streets that he knows like the back of his hand but that now seem like endless labyrinths.

For a second he wonders if he’s reading this wrong. If the smudged ink tried to say something else instead, if the little pieces of paper where nothing but that and the streets he’s driving through are the right ones.

Just when he gets to the front of the Dumbar-Greyer house, with a clear sight of the maroon wooden door and the creamy white walls behind the small but colourfully filled by flowers front yard, he dares to think what is what he wants to happen. Does he want Liam to be waiting? Does he want to flee or does he want to fight for the only thing he ached so long for?

The questions are muffled as a background sound on his head when the front door clicks open and a very confused looking Liam peeks out, watching at the truck. Baby blue eyes pin him in place over the driver’s seat and for a moment Theo keeps himself still, trying to gain his breath back. Both of them just staring at each other. Expecting.

But Theo knows it’s his turn to make a move, the ball on his court now.

Quickly slapping away the yellow notes out of his thighs, he takes the picture with him. There’s barely a second between opening the driver’s door and leaping out. And barely half between the truck and where Liam’s standing. Under his skin, there’s a restlessness that urges him to turn and run. But Liam seems to pull him closer, to force him into gravitate all around him and jinx his soul, if he has any, into thinking that the only way to keep on breathing is being by the beta’s side.

One of his hands is fisted tightly, ready to take its claws out. Full natural force and instinct, a primal need to react to possible danger of being hurt. The other one, instead, is the complete opposite. Cradling the picture gingerly between his fingertips, as if it is delicate butterflies wings, ready to be dust and disappear under his touch.

“What is this?”

Theo wants his voice to be thunder but it’s nothing more that a summer breeze. Both hands are shaking, but he still lifts the one with the picture. Showing his pride, his new treasure.  Showing his shame, his never ending fear.

Liam looks at him for a moment and then at the quivering picture, baby blue eyes raking every detail in a way that can only be due to memory. How many times had the beta looked at it while it was still in his possession? His adam’s apple bobs and for Theo it looks forced, as if the young wolf is trying to swallow down the words that threaten with spill out of his mouth. The silence stretches more and more, who knows how much time ticked away in the clock already. The only thing Theo knows is that he wants those words. He _needs_ to hear them.

“This is your handwriting, right?”. Desperation is clawing his insides and the lack of a reply is just pulling him down a bit more. Wave after wave of emotions he doesn’t expect, of a hollowness he doesn’t want anymore crash over his soul and he’s letting the tide drown him. “They have _your_ scent. What _is_ this? What does it _mean_?”

“It means that I care, Theo,” comes the calm reply, like a soft caress to his very core. Liam pulls out from one of his front pockets a neatly folded yellow post-it now, wrinkled and creased in more than one way. When he opens it, Theo’s own handwriting and hopelessness face him. _Am I capable of being loved?_ Green eyes snap back to Liam’s face, who smiles earnestly at him. A glint of something that Theo so many times saw and now can identify as fondness shine on the beta’s eyes. “It means that I care and that I love more than you think I do”

And just like that, his soul cracks and re-shapes.

Painfully and hard and _liberating_.

Tears start falling again, this time tasting sweeter over his tongue. Or maybe it’s the strong arms wrapping around his middle, pulling him closer to a reality that for once he wants to be part of. Pulling and pulling until his face is tucked in the crook of Liam’s neck and sweet nothings are whispered into his ear. Long gone the silence, the fear, the desperation. The claws in his inside now aren’t tearing apart anything but rather trying to get close.

A fleeting pressure and the wash of soft breath over his cheek is the first kiss they share. From Liam to Theo, who’s still trembling by the onslaught of emotions and trying to calm down his erratic heartbeat. One hand clutching tightly at the beta’s side, the other still treating like gold the piece of paper that’s a whole portrait of the chimera’s looks and soul.

Fluttering eyelashes against the underside of Liam’s jaw is their second one. There are tears still clinging to Theo’s eyelashes, crumpling them together. The kiss is delicate and damp, barely tickling the tanned skin.

Their third kiss is prompted by warm hands cradling the sides of Theo’s face, urging him to look up. It starts in a tender baby blue toned gaze and ends in a watery and hopeful green toned one.

Each one of them making Theo’s skin tingle.

But the fourth, that’s the one that ignites fire. Chapped plumb lips against trembling ones, a soft and tentative pressure, assuring each other of their presence. Mouths gently mapping each other. Trying, searching, fitting like missed pieces of an unfinished puzzle. It soon grows,between sharing unspoken words and spilled emotions. With longing, with craving, with _I’ve been waiting’_ s and _Thanks for finding me’_ s.

“I love you,” Liam whispers over his lips, voice so light that it could have been mistaken for a shallow breath. But it’s there, just three words. A whole world ahead.

And Theo smiles, a warm puff of air leaving his lungs in the process and wafting over Liam’s mouth, who smiles equally wide. Mere inches from one another that the chimera erases with a fifth kiss and the many others to come.

 _Am I capable of being loved?_ The creased yellow paper now crumpled and forgotten on the floor.

This time, it’s not a question haunting his mind.

_I am now._

Theo believes it’s true.

**Author's Note:**

> The awesome picture that **snaeken** found
> 
> https://favim.com/image/253552/


End file.
